"Mike Bloomberg's Marie Antoinette Moment" By Matt Taibbi From the piece: "On the other hand, nobody who actually understands anything about banking, or has spent more than ten minutes inside a Wall Street office, believes any of that crap. In the financial world, the fairy tales about the CRA causing the crash inspire a sort of chuckling bemusement, as though they were tribal bugaboos explaining bad rainfall or an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth, ghost stories and legends good for scaring the masses. But nobody actually believes them. Did government efforts to ease lending standards put a lot of iffy borrowers into homes? Absolutely. Were there a lot of people who wouldnât have gotten homes twenty or thirty years ago who are now in foreclosure thanks to government efforts to make mortgages more available? Sure â no question. But did any of that have anything at all to do with the explosion of subprime home lending that caused the gigantic speculative bubble of the mid-2000s, or the crash that followed? Not even slightly. The whole premise is preposterous. And Mike Bloomberg knows it." Full article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/mike-bloombergs-marie-antoinette-moment-20111103
Matt Taibbi would have more credibility if he chopped that front tuft of bangs off, i only only have to look at him for 1 second to tell he is a con artist, who is trying to fool people into thinking he is not going bald.
Haha, good to know im not the only person who is bothered by this... I tried to find a better image, some days there is a good 4-5 inches between where his bangs end and his actual hairline begins, the guy looks like a total goof, i dont know who he thinks he is fooling....
Yes indeed, Matt Taibbi's article is chock full of ad hominen attacks, thank you for pointing that out. Forgive me if i dont take a guy with a haircut like that seriously, especially when he ends his articles with pearls of wisdom like: "Well, you know what, Mike Bloomberg? FUCK YOU. The guy is more of a clown then Keith Olbermann, and even less informed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...e-goes-viral/2011/10/31/gIQAXlSOqM_story.html Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault. Indeed, the arguments these folks make fail to withstand even casual scrutiny. But that has not stopped people who should know better from repeating them. The Big Lie made a surprise appearance Tuesday when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to a question about Occupy Wall Street, stunned observers by exonerating Wall Street: âIt was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.â What made his comments so stunning is that he built Bloomberg Data Services on the notion that data are what matter most to investors. The terminals are found on nearly 400,000 trading desks around the world, at a cost of $1,500 a month. (Do the math â thatâs over half a billion dollars a month.) Perhaps the fact that Wall Street was the source of his vast wealth biased him. But the key principle of the business that made the mayor a billionaire is that fund managers, economists, researchers and traders should ignore the squishy narrative and, instead, focus on facts. Yet he ignored his own principles to repeat statements he should have known were false.
Bloomberg saying that the banks were not at fault is equally absurd as lefties making the claim that it was entirely the banks fault. It took participation from everyone including, the government, fannie and freddie, the banks as well as greedy people trying to speculate on houses they couldnt afford to make the whole thing possible.
Yes, i read the article, and i knew the article was going to be by Taibbi just by seeing the link in your OP, Taibbi is a clown. You mean to say you had never heard of or seen Taibbi before this article?